


Mouth of the Wolf

by vass



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Mating Cycles/In Heat, Other, Psychic Wolves, See Endnotes For Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-23 08:39:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9648377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/pseuds/vass
Summary: Breq has a psychic wolf. Raughd Denche is a horrible person.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Petra for audiencing and for egging me on when I wanted to use the title That's Raughd, Buddy. Did you know that in Mongolian folk medicine, sprinkling food with powdered wolf rectum is said to cure hemorrhoids? That is completely irrelevant to this story, it's just a factoid I found on Wikipedia while looking for a usable title. (I settled on borrowing from the Italian equivalent of "break a leg." Digression: are we to take Breq's canonical predilection for injuring legs (including her own) as an allusion to the theatre superstition, give that she's a singer?) Happy Lupercalia and/or Genitalia Festival, everyone.
> 
> If you're not familiar with the psychic wolf trope, please read [this short primer](http://petra.dreamwidth.org/770014.html) first. This story will not make sense without it. Does not take place in the same universe as my other Radchaai psychic wolf story, [Communication](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3364106). For the purpose of this fic, Breq is aro-ace and has sex for pragmatic reasons only. Time period is Ancillary Sword, with mild spoilery foreshadowing for Ancillary Mercy.
> 
> Detailed warnings about this fic are at the footer, skip to there first if you want to know what you're in for.

For the first two weeks in gate-space, nearly the whole crew had been of the opinion that Memory's heat suppressants were failing and that Seivarden and Propriety were being remiss in their duty to attend to our comfort.

Medic and Stone had known better, of course, and had tactfully explained to a few interested parties that Stone, as a medic's sister, had been permanently neutered and could not assist anyone in the heat tent.

Ekalu, wolfless and acutely embarrassed, had not wished to comment beyond an inquiry to Ship, which it had relayed to me, about whether a lord-wolf going into heat might become angry if the sister of her only available mate smelled of sex with some other officer. Ship had reassured her on that point, and had tactfully not communicated her concern to Seivarden.

Tisarwat, of course, had known exactly why I was angry.

It was ironic, then, that Memory's heat suppressants did give way not long after that, downwell on Athoek. "The will of Amaat," some would have said. A very Radchaai sentiment: the universe is as it is, therefore however things are is the universe's will. 

I had never believed in the will of God, but I might have put Memory's condition down to random chance or the effects of stress or correctives, if I had not been alert for sabotage already. It was fortunate, also, that the saboteur, unfamiliar with wolves or misjudging the dose, had timed her ambush too early.

As it was, Raughd Denche found me irritable but lucid. She wasted no time trying to convince me that she was overcome with affection for me. Perhaps her concern for my well-being might have looked touching to someone of her class, if they had never seen beyond her facade. To me the veneer seemed so thin as to be non-existent. She spoke of the danger to my health, of stress and hardship. She did not express a word of concern for my sister.

"Citizen, I must beg your pardon. You are very kind, but I am afraid you do not understand the nature of heats," I said. It was no wonder she did not. Denche was not a military house, and it was likely the only wolf-sister she had met was Captain Hetnys, who would scarcely have discussed such details with Raughd. "It is not my relief that ends the heat but my sister's. And so, unless you are sister to a dog-wolf, I am afraid..."

She interrupted me, high and supercilious. "Come now, Fleet Captain. There is no need to be vulgar." My vulgarity, if any, had been confined to the biological term for the kind of wolf Memory would need to mate with, unless I got her back onto new, and stronger, suppressants very shortly.

Which would, I had already realized, be difficult and even dangerous at this stage of the hormonal chain reaction. If only I had let her breed more than twice in the last nineteen years! Once on the space station where we fetched up, helpless with shock and loss, and improbably soon after her last weaning on Shis'urna, the one surviving issue of which had given us away on Omaugh. Sunder-shock and traumatic bonding were not unlikely to trigger unseasonable heats in lord-wolves, of course. And in a sense I, too, had been sunder-shocked, severed not from a wolf-sister but from the rest of myself. That had been Memory's reasoning, when she had chosen to bond with her sister's killer...

The only other time had been in the Tetrarchy, in a bloody but successful ritual. We had left a litter of Memory's pups safely there, and a sample of my stem cells for their banks, in accordance with the local custom, should the other participants wish to reproduce with me. Selfishly, I had kept Memory on suppressants whenever I could, and that period in the priesthood had been the only time she had gone off them altogether.

Raughd was still talking. "There is no one around. Surely you can dispense with the pretense that your charming wolf is anything but an animal."

"I assure you, Citizen," I began, gesturing sincerity and placation, but she interrupted again.

"It is you, and not some _non-human_ , whose needs matter," she went on, using a Radchaai word which connoted ritual uncleanness and applied to animals, aliens, corpses, and, of course, ancillaries. I stepped back from her. "Only superstitious provincials would think otherwise..."

Memory growled, and I found I could not be certain whose anger she was expressing, hers or my own.

"Everyone knows that wolves' heats are an excuse for officers to indulge," Raughd went on blithely. "If the wolf's appetites were truly so inconvenient to you, it could simply be knocked out."

I had made a tactical error in stepping back. Memory's irritability, and my own, were greater than I had accounted for, and I had given her a clear path at Raughd.

She growled again, and advanced on Raughd, signaling her threat in language even a civilian could not fail to understand. Raughd withdrew swiftly, leaving me to consider the extreme delicacy of our position, confined here during my mourning period by the same custom which our host's daughter was breaching so thoroughly.

*

By the time Raughd planted a bomb in the bath-house, Memory's irritation had grown to a constant rage in which fasting was no difficulty at all, and every person or animal in our vicinity was an annoyance, most of all Captain Hetnys and her unoriginally named sister. Sword was a dog-wolf, in fact, and therefore technically an eligible mate, but Memory's disgust for her was clear. Fortunate in one way: I would not owe Hetnys a favor, or be forced into a prolonged closer connection with her by the disposition of shared puppies. But unfortunate in that there was no other eligible mate nearby, Memory's case would soon be desperate, and my own skin felt far too tight and hot.

I do not remember the distance between the bath-house near Fosyf's manor and the rudimentary lean-to shelter on the far side of her plantation, in a fallow field bordered by a swift river, where Memory and I ended up. I remember the smell of blood through our bond, and the pounding of my own heart, and a brief, sharp pain as she twisted her left hind foot in some sort of burrow, then kept running. I remember Ship's voice in my ear, our ears, "Hold on, Fleet Captain, hold on."

Memory heard and smelled _Mercy of Kalr_ 's shuttle before I did, of course, and relayed it to me along with the reassuring concept _pack_. I was beyond wondering when Ship had sent the shuttle, or had recalled it in order to send it, although later I had cause to reflect that I must have been affected by Memory's heat earlier than I'd known, not to have noticed.

The shuttle, and one of its occupants, stopped a safe distance away, and the other two came forward at a quick walk. Memory recognized them immediately, of course, and with loud relief. It was Seivarden and Propriety. I could not bring myself not to be relieved also, I found. Even if they were not here to help us the way Memory so desperately wanted, at least they were known quantities, and military. I put my hand on Memory's shoulder, to prevent her from running to meet them, injured paw and all.

Then they were with us in the lean-to, and there was enough time for Seivarden to look wide-eyed at me for some reason, and say "God, Breq," and for me to say, over Memory's very clear declaration to Propriety of her intentions, "Seivarden, if you're not willing to..." and then she said "of _course_ I am," and Memory and Propriety weren't waiting any longer and neither were Seivarden and I.

As I pinned her on my back and ground our hips together, Memory pulled our minds closer still, and the images flashed fast and sharp and wet, hands and mouths and groins and more thoughts of me, from the last year, than I had time to wonder at, shot through with heavy-scented want and entwined with the two wolves' hunger. I bit her on the neck, as my sister bit her sister, and felt her whole body go limp with surrender.

There came a point when the pack sense between the four of us overloaded my single body's ability to process it, when for one endless moment was if I were more than that single body, as if I were with myself again, as if both our cries came from my own throats.

*

Lax and spent, later on, resting against Seivarden in the protective circle of our wolves, I was able to reflect.

Propriety had been well named -- she had been guarding more of her sister's thoughts and feelings than I had known. More than I could -- or wanted to, truthfully -- do anything about. In the drowsy comfort of fur and skin and pack-sense, I regretted that a little. I would need to find a way to tell Seivarden to modify her expectations without setting off a flood of distress for me to placate or risk destroying the emotional balance of _Mercy of Kalr_ 's little pack.

That brought me to another reflection, about the mating itself. It had not been like this during those other two heats, and I could not pretend that was only because the wolves and humans on those occasion had not been part of the Radchaai military. There had been something else making me feel almost whole again for the first time in so long, giving me that doubled sense of Seivarden's body against mine, experienced through more channels than my own senses and the wolves'. Ship had been there with us, feeding me Seivarden's data. Or had I, in extremity, pulled the data from it? I felt a sudden chill of uncertainty, without knowing quite why. Memory, curled up behind me, stirred uneasily in response.

I couldn't think of what to say to Ship, what questions to ask. Was not yet strong enough to pull myself up out of warm, boneless lassitude. But I would need to think about these things, and soon.

**Author's Note:**

> I chose Choose Not To Warn because I'm not exactly sure how to, but relevant warnings are: attempted rape (via hormonal coercion, it doesn't get very far and no one touches anyone) and later on (not with the same person!) sex that is dubiously consensual because heat cycles but is briefly negotiated and consented to as far as possible under the circumstances.
> 
> Also the wolves have reproductive roles (i.e. some of them can become pregnant and some of them can inseminate) and Breq discusses this and has words for it, although without projecting human concepts of gender all over it.


End file.
